The Internet in its present-day form allows users to perform a multitude of tasks that encompass the fields of information dissemination and management, entertainment, merchandising, shopping, auctions, communications, etc. The increasing popularity of the Internet has created a massive explosion of the number of multimedia documents stored at servers distributed across the Internet. Users download millions of documents per hour via the Internet. A large number of those documents are illegally distributed between users and their peers or via bootleg Web sites.
Because of the pace of the mass distribution of multimedia material, many issues have arisen regarding the ownership, or copyrights, of the authors and providers of such material. Some solutions have been used to try to preserve the copyrights of authors and providers. Digital solutions such as signatures, watermarks, and hidden tags within the material have been used to mark the material. The marked material is then distributed to end users. Unfortunately, these approaches are static solutions that are added during the creation of such material and can only indicate the author's or provider's identity.
Static approaches do not track the original purchaser of a particular content. For example, a video file may be legally obtained by one user through a purchase from a content owner. The video file is then illegally distributed across the Internet by that user. When the illegal copies are discovered by the content owner, the content owner has no idea who the original purchaser of the video file was.
Organizations such as the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) have begun nationwide searches for illegal distribution of their content. The MPAA, for example, has sued many individuals for the illegal distribution of the MPAA's members' content. If a content owner could stem the illegal distribution of their content by tracking down the original content purchaser and stopping the initial distribution from ground zero, then there would be less proliferation of illegal copies of the content.
It would be advantageous to provide a dynamic multimedia fingerprinting system that allows content owners to be able to examine content and easily discover the identity of the original purchaser. The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.